As if to prove my pessimistic statements about Skeptiko wrong,
Mr.Sandman has posted there about an interesting experimental proposal by the theoretical physicist Lucien Hardy, for a test of Bell's inequalities, in which random number generators are replaced by the output of EEGs. This has sparked off some discussion:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/a-...tter.3831/
Funnily enough, a professor of theoretical physics recommended a little while ago that I should look at the work of Hardy and his former research supervisor, Euan Squires. (I had also noted previously the paper referred to on "Quanta and Qualia" by Professor Adrian Kent, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cambridge [England] =
http://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-ad...ualia-2016 )
Regardless of the details I think it is encouraging that mainstream theoretical physicists are willing to ask questions like these.
I'm afraid my understanding of the relevant physics is virtually non-existent, but based on my feeble efforts to grasp what this is about, I don't think Hardy is coming at it from quite the same angle as the parapsychologists who think "spooky action at a distance"/entanglement may be the physical process that underlies psi phenomena.
Subject to correction, it seems there is a viewpoint that the "spookiness" could be dispelled if the universe were in some fundamental sense deterministic, so that the random number generators used in tests of Bell's inequalities were really only pseudo-random, allowing an escape from the spectre of non-local action.
Apparently Hardy's idea is that even if this were true, the human mind might not be deterministic - either because it didn't depend entirely on the material world, or because complex systems somehow transcended the prevailing determinism of the physical universe. If I understand correctly, that's the notion this experiment would test - though I'm happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood.